No one expected that the British infantry would march 50 miles inland to storm the capital. It was too far off, and they would have to slog through woods and dense thickets and brush to achieve their goal. No one even knew their target. There was speculation that they might swing toward Baltimore, Annapolis, or even sites further south.

A lull. We were not short of things to trouble us: the major had been hit in the chest by a shell splinter. We had exhausted our rations, there was scarcely half a bottle of water left per man; ammunition was scarce! Suddenly, over on our left, we heard the sounds of numerous tanks moving! The Canadians! At last! We looked for the green flares. Nothing! We came down to earth: they were German tanks advancing on us.

The smellscape, also unmitigated by air-conditioning, was different, too. The heat and humidity would distill the pungent aromas of the fermenting hops in the breweries into an olfactory miasma that settled like a fog over the city. Adding to this yeasty mix were the St. Louis National Stockyards, whose thick, loamy, gamey smells—ripening manure, blood, rancid fats from the slaughterhouse—filled your nostrils. Breathe deeply and you recoiled as the stench hit the bottom of your brain, a reptile memory suddenly brought alive.

The experimental road originally was divided into 63 sections ranging from 100 to 250 feet each. Twenty-two sections were brick, 17 asphalt and 24 concrete, “several thicknesses of each type being used so that the capacity of each section, measured in terms of weight and number of trucks, will be plainly obvious.”